Prompt 5
Exploring the children’s picture book ‘Dust’ in this week’s seminar was an eye opening experience that depicted the powerful nature of such a book. 1. Potential sentences using every word in the Wordle: - One cold night I sat alone with no food or strength, I felt hollow, looked transparent and all I could hear was silence…I died a lonely death. -Just before I died I listened to the silence echo and watched the transparent night sky disappear as I sat crammed in a hollow tree, cold, with no strength or food. 2. Potential re-written sentences for the image/page from ‘Dust’ of food being scraped into a rubbish bin: -The world around continues to spin…does anyone even care about us? -It kills me to think that people can just carry on with their everyday lives and ignore such tragedy. -How wrong to think children around the world are dying and yet there are cold hearted and ignorant people out there throwing away their food. -Here we are begging for the food we don’t have and there you are simply disposing of it. 3. There are a vast range of great front-loading activities that can be utilised as before reading activities. We explored, through modelling in seminars, a couple devised by Marsha Dickins. Another short ten-to-twenty minute frontloading lesson you may do before a book is read is a mini vocabulary lesson. The frontloading activity you might do could involve the creation and exploration of a ‘Word Splash’. A word splash is learning tool and front loading activity that helps to stimulate the children’s thinking around a topic. Exploring a collection of interesting, key or tricky words from the text or relative to its main content and themes through depicting these ‘splashed’ out on a page and then doing little tasks with the vocabulary is effective. Pre-teaching and ensuring an understanding of relative vocabulary before reading is effective in facilitating student’s future comprehension of the text. Students can brainstorm and come up with statements that connect the words or phrases and suggest ways in which they relate to the main topic. You could then also make these chosen words into vocabulary cards and rotated these among the students and get them to write down what they think of when they hear that word, any synonyms for the word and write into a sentence etc. Another frontloading mini lesson/activity you may do could involve the development of a Know-Want-Learn (KWL) activity chart. You could chose the underlying theme of the text or its most relevant topic and this then becomes the basis for the creation of the KWL chart. Students have to fill out the three columns of the chart: - what I (K)now - what I (W)ant to know - what I (L)earned This frontloading technique and brainstorming what students already know is essential in activating prior knowledge and information – key to the purpose of frontloading. As students then share the things they know with the class, this then raises certain questions that can be put down in the ‘W’ column. In the ‘L’ column students can make notes about answers to these questions and then later they have a visual to go back to and add new information they have learned after reading the text.
